This blog is aimed mainly at advanced students of English as a foreign / second language, although it will hopefully also be of some interest to teachers. I intend it to be a mishmash of lessons, exercises and the occasional opinionated rant about the English language.

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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Collected outwith quotes

Some time ago I wrote a post titled 'Is outwith a word?' (link below), which continues to get quite a lot of hits. The preposition outwith is used in educated Scottish English to mean something like 'outside, not part of'. One way to look at it is as the opposite of within.

Recently there have been a couple of comments on that post which have led me to look for examples among well-known Scottish writers, and I thought it might be a good idea to collect these examples of outwith together, where possible linking to them in Google Books or other source.

I've also included a section with more historical use, often using facsimiles from the books themselves. Apart from anything else, these show what the Scottish English of the Court and the Law of these times looked like, and the sort of spellings that were then prevalent.

As it is my intention that this should be an ongoing work, and that I will be adding examples to it as and when I find them, I've made a page rather than a post for them, which can be found here.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

We can use several verbs to talk about the parts that form or make up something (the whole). Some can be a little confusing, and with one, not everybody agrees on all its uses. Read a bit about them and do a short exercise. (Hat-tip to Peter Harvey at Lavengro, whose post gave me the idea - see links).

Saturday, November 16, 2013

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian ran what they called 'a fiendish language quiz', set by their 'style guru', David Marsh, author of the recently published 'For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man's Quest for Grammatical Perfection'. In one of the questions, entrants had to say what was wrong with this sentence:

'Outstanding performances include Caryl Morgan's Beatie, in bobby socks and denim, on the cusp of womanhood but still impressionable and dreamy, and Sara Harris-Davies as the mother she still looks up to.'

The answers have now been published, and the official answer to this one was:

You can't be on the cusp of one thing. Although it is often misused to mean "on the brink" or "on the verge", strictly "on the cusp" involves two things, for example "on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini" or, as it should have been here, "on the cusp of girlhood and womanhood".

While taking the point that a cusp is between two things (often two periods), I wondered whether it was really necessary to explicitly mention both; on the cusp of womanhood looked fine to me. So I decided to investigate.

Click and Drop - Wherever you see this symbol ?, place the cursor over it for instructions, using your mouse.

Answers - At the bottom of the post you will find a row of answer buttons. Click on the appropriate button and return to the exercise.

Print friendly - Each post is designed to be printable. Exercises usually appear on separate pages, or grouped together on a page. You can make a teacher copy with answers by clicking on 'Show All', then printing. Make sure you 'Clear All' before printing student copies. I strongly recommend doing a Print Preview first. You might want to change your margins and you certainly won't want to print every page.

Update - On newer posts, many of the exercises are individually printable. Just click on the print button, and they will appear in a new, easily printable page.

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About Me

Hi. I'm a common-or-garden TEFL teacher living and working in Poland. My background is British, Scottish to be precise.
I am definitely neither a linguist nor an expert on grammar, simply someone with a healthy interest in my language and its development.